Chemiefaserwerk - Collagen

ATTN:Magazine

“We live in a world of musical undo and versioning.” – R. Henke

This quote sits atop the Bandcamp release description for Collagen. Of course, undo and versioning are the primary symptoms of digital music in the modern age: the transience and potential rearrangement of cloud-stored files, the infinite production scrutiny afforded by laptop-based home recording. Nothing is fixed. Even if the digital medium may be immune to the effects of passing time (unlike the mediums of cassette and vinyl), the audio within can be easily reshaped. Collagen returns this principle to the physical world. Using several tape machines, Chemiefaserwerk enacts the process of infinite adjustment; forever rewinding certain segments and running them again, anxiously adjusting playback speeds, cutting audio dead and splicing atmospheres together. Whereas digital versioning can be conducted cleanly and without leaving a trace, I imagine the creation of Collagen to be a frantic tangle of tape; an ungainly criss-cross of re-threaded spools and tape segments stuck awkwardly together, resulting in a soundscape that jerks and splutters through an endless state of indecision and distraction.

The record reminds me of those moments of mental hyperactivity; like sitting down for a moment of quiet solitude, only to realise that the mind is a cacophony of colliding thoughts and competing concerns (caffeine-aided, no doubt). Extracts of classical music and percussive exercise come warbling atop strands of drone, before decaying suddenly like soft objects dropped into acid. Strange analogue noises burst into view and then disappear, as though retracted in sudden, reflexive pangs of sound-editing regret. Collagen captures the anxious twitches of editing fingers – hands flying across knobs and hurriedly replacing one tape with another – as though Chemiefaserwerk is searching for something within the mess of archival capture. Field recordings are upturned like boxes in the attic; drones are picked up in bunches and frantically thrown aside; curious clacks and rustles are left to linger (examined closely, turned and prised apart) before being placed back into a state of silence. While there is undoubtedly love and attentive craft within the re-arrangement and merging of sound, there’s also the sense that such a process is the by-product of a much more significant pursuit – a quest to discover a particularly special, solitary second of sound within the crates of forgotten field recording and analogue recollection, like a scientist in search of a molecule which, according to hypothesis and relentless theoretical research, should be in here somewhere.

Thu Jun 16 11:30:55 GMT 2016

A Closer Listen 0

With this review we welcome France’s new label Falt, which is “all about silent home-dubbing, photocopier machines, typewriters, scissors, glue, tapehiss and intentional noise”.  We love the description, and this inaugural cassette makes the perfect introduction.  It’s the second release we’ve reviewed this year from tape experimentalist Chemiefaserwerk, who works with samples, splices and internal cassette mechanisms.  By adding his own electronic textures and field recordings, the artist makes sonic collages that are often difficult to decipher, but fascinating as mosaics of sound.

The eye is immediately drawn to the title, “Lathe Cut Record,” and I asked the label to confirm that the track is not actually the sound of a lathe cut.  While it’s not, it could be, and the title is a guide to the imagination.  (There’s a great album waiting to be made that samples the machinery and circuitry used in lathe cuts, LP production, cassette and CD manufacturing and digital conversion, but we’ll leave that for the next release.)  There is actually such a thing as a “collagen cassette”, which is “used by other proteins to achieve a specific protein structure” (Wayne D. Comper, ed., Extracellular Matrix), but we assure our readers that this cassette is made out of plastic.  Still, the associations have been made: body, machine and connecting tissue, whether sturdy drone or lugubrious tissue.  Chemiefaserwerk implies that the inner workings of bodies and machineries have a similar base.  Turntables do in fact make a sampled appearance on this cassette (a strange sentence!).  But more often than not, the listener encounters the sound of an artist painting with tape and tape machines: cutting, rewinding, layering, changing speed.  In the end, Collagen is a cassette about cassettes.

The sounds promised by the label appear throughout the recording.  There is indeed hiss, which tumbles into noise; one can imagine the photocopier and the typewriter; and the very look of the physical edition prompts a nostalgia for home dubbing.  Last week I made a mixtape for a radio show and an acquaintance asked, “You have a cassette player?  A double cassette player?  Where would you even get one of these things?”  My first reaction was, “haven’t you ever heard of Amazon?”  My second was that tapes have virtually disappeared from mainstream conversation, but as our staff writer Zach Corsa would tell us, cassette culture is very much alive.  Collagen is an ideal release for the format, a mysterious band of sounds that are impossible to identify, close to home yet far away, buried in the past yet re-dredged.  To listen to these clicks and cuts, these small drones, these buzzes and plastic ejections is to celebrate the under-appreciated and claim it as one’s own.  (Richard Allen)

Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016